


let's admit without apology what we do to each other

by clytemnestras



Category: The Rules of Attraction - All Media Types
Genre: Canon Bisexual Character, Canon-Typical Biphobia, Canon-Typical Homophobia, Depression, Lauren Is Not A Nice Girl, Multi, Polyamory, Recreational Drug Use, Threesome - F/M/M, Unhealthy Relationships, this is the definition of lowkey fucked up if if i'm being honest with you guys
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-08-31
Updated: 2016-08-31
Packaged: 2018-08-12 06:50:22
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,691
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7924780
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/clytemnestras/pseuds/clytemnestras
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>winter is bleak and fitting, if not for the trading of sweat, then for the casual blanketing of emotion like snow over Camden’s campus.</p><p>(or, Sean gets off the damn bike, Lauren becomes an emotional bombsite and there is most unhappy poly-not-quite-amory)</p>
            </blockquote>





	let's admit without apology what we do to each other

**Author's Note:**

> title by Siken because I am nothing if not a depressive, predictable queer; modeled after the movie more than the book
> 
> (later I will write the book version and it will be more upsetting and Lauren will get herself some therapy and possibly join a commune and Dick will smack his lips together until the world takes notice)

Paul taps on the door using the back of his fingernails, a facsimile of timidity that Lauren does not swallow for a second. Lara has already yanked all of her shit from the room and it looks rather bare, rather sparse, much more fitting for Lauren’s preferred façade. She stretches out on the blue bedsheet and doesn't move but to blink up icily at him from her anthro textbook.

He holds in his hands a bottle of gin and several little packets of something questionably legal. 

She asks, her voice sharp and slightly hoarse from disuse; “is this a party or a come on?”

Paul's laugh is short, false and familiar, makes his ears twitch and dominate his otherwise uncannily handsome features.

“You're not slutty enough to be my type anymore.” He throws everything down at her where her feet twist at the end of the bed and climbs on, pulling off his shoes and jacket and swiping the gin in a unnatural though smooth manoeuvre.

“But not with the wrong equipment?” Goading has morphed to second nature - hurting people a balm to her nerves. She might say the year has corrupted her. She might be overstating things.

“Bisexuality is a word. Learn it.” He leers, tongue poking quickly across his lower lip. “Can't former lovers and romantic rivals toast to their misery together after the end of the world?”

Lauren inspects the drugs with a perfected standoffishness and shakes open a heavily scrutinised bag.

He looks up at her over the lip of the glass bottle, eyes an awful, hypnotic blue and she looks back with the same intensity.

“What was it you said he saw in you?”

Lauren can feel her smile bloom into something dark. “My innocence,” she says, and ducks down to inhale a long line of blow.

The room is cold and Lauren's arm hair raises with every short shiver from the cocaine and the cold and it would be easy to unfurl back onto the bed and watch Paul in the haze, dissect him as she leaves her skin behind. But her insides still ache in memory and just lying exposed feels like invitation, passing out feels like an invitation, so she cuts him a line.

“What about you, then.” She dabs the excess into her gums from the corner of her pinkie finger. “What did you see in the great Sean Bateman?”

Paul rolls his head back then slinks forward, smiling again in a nasty way that crawls somewhere close to Lauren's bones. He slides up to the line, down on his knees before her, watching her even as he inhales. “I liked his intensity.”

Lauren grabs the bottle of gin. “You fucking liar.”

 

*

 

Sean falls asleep in Lara's abandoned bed, bloody and scarred. He is still wearing his bike leathers, a razor blade and a bottle of prescription painkillers having tumbled from his pocket and onto the sheets.

He's broken the lock on her door, and erased the warning message from the whiteboard.

Lauren comes in to find him there, her hands shaking and her blood hot under skin. “If you're not dead you need to get the fuck out of my room.”

He has an awful ease with himself that makes her want to scream, even as he makes a short, ugly sound and turns over.

It's almost startling how broken he can look in one moment and how suddenly he switches to something entirely unlike by opening his eyes.

Sometimes looking at him makes her want to die.

He looks at her with blood around his mouth and nostrils, breathing in the dried copper, and he doesn't say anything. He curls up and gets comfortable in her whitewashed space daring her to break him again.

“You're an ass.”

He doesn't flinch. Sean is a creature more hardend to the brutal sides of life than she but oh, she is learning. He traces her steps with his eyes, as she goes from the door to the stereo, turning on an old Tchaikovsky tape she stole from her English professor and stripping out of her coat and sweater until there's nothing but a thin vest between his eyes and her body.

“Does it hurt?” She asks, picking up The Book from the bottom rung of her bookshelf and reclining on the bed, laying it between her spread legs.

“Like death,” he says, his body a heaving, sore lump across from her, dripping and scabbing, hardly differing from the pus oozing tableau laid out before her. He stretches and sits up, knocking the pills onto the floor. They spill from the bottle in a small cacophony, breaking through the classical melody. “Tell me,” he says, “did you want me to do it?”

She snaps the book shut. “Fuck you.”

Still with him watching, gaze like some heavy other skin, she pulls off the vest and stares out at her scant wardrobe, fishing a black shift dress from between the threadbare sweaters and pulling it on. There is always another room swelling with sweaty bodies and cheap beer, boys with dicks straining in their overpriced corduroy and she needs it in this glass moment. Shattered idolatry is the Camden norm, a rite of passage to fuck yourself up so utterly that nobody can recognise the burning remains.

“You'll freeze out there,” he says, making no move to get up.

“One can only hope.”

 

*

 

They are not friends.

Paul will drape himself over her when he's stoned and let her take his weight as he scans the room hunting for prey, and she will chain-smoke but not shrug him off.

He likes them pretty, likes blondes, likes toned bodies and bright eyes. There is an ever-present, vague horror to knowing they crave similar monsters.

Still, even as he stands in his underwear, blowing smoke into her mouth in the middle of Sean’s old bedroom, they are not friends. Not with the slow rocking of their hips waiting for some kind of reaction from Sean’s lazy eyes, not with the way his fingers are sure and close to harsh when they squeeze around her hips.

They pull apart unsatisfied but her fingers and lips feel somewhere between numb and tingling and she can't tell who she is in the dim light of the room. When she looks up Sean is gone with the good vodka, and Paul is laughing, his body thrown onto the bed and vodka spilling all across his mouth and throat.

He rests his hand on his crotch and smiles at her filthily. “He just doesn't give in does he?”

“Martyr complex.” She fixes her shirt and sits on the end of the bed, letting him haul her up and hold her against him, both of them over warm despite the snow outside.

She's wet and he's hard and they don't even speak to each other, they just lie there frustrated until sleep prevails. It's closer than she felt when they dated, and she'd let him fuck her if he asked. But he doesn't.

Two weeks later, someone called Richard comes by and there are photos stuck up all over campus of Paul's dick nestled in the tight grip of Richard’s left hand, both of them laughing in the middle of a houseparty. He gets the shit knocked out of him when he looks the wrong way at a dead-eyed kid on a football scholarship and sits on the floor of her room getting stoned until it doesn't hurt to breathe.

They find out the next morning that the guy ended up in hospital with three broken ribs, moments after Sean comes and collapses onto Lara's bed with a ruined right hand.

 

*

 

“I don't fucking understand you." Sean is wild eyed and the marks on his face are still long, dark shadows under his eyes and he looks like the line between broken murderous as he backs her against the wall.

The room is too dark and she can only see herself as a shadow reflected in his eyes and it's always eyes with them, too good for spoken word, just inference and blown pupils for thought. He’s as drunk as her, both of them having spent the Sweat Off The Snow party necking with other people until somewhere between the bitter looks shot over heads their partners faded into a less hostile elsewhere.

“I said I don't understand you, who the fuck are you?” He doesn't threaten or bang the wall he just stands there, pressing them both into a small world apart from everything.

“I don't fucking know anymore, Christ.” Words come out like screaming but that's hardly surprising and it's not a lie, either. Her whole self has been savaged by the winter, an unfeeling, bitter girl who laughs at the things that love her because it feels like death might be one of them.

She squares her jaw. “You don't want me,” she says. “You want something good so you can pretend that goodness lives inside you. Well, face it Gandhi, you're too late. Impurity fucked me just like everyone else in this hellhole. Get over yourself.”

His fist curls against the wall and his nostrils flare enough she might be able to see through them, his body so close the air has grown insipid between them. His jaw pops and the veins along his neck strain and it's good, she wants him to lose it, wants this to be _over_ already and -

And his mouth is warm like she wanted it to be, his hands big where they cradle her jaw. His tongue pushes into her mouth in a filthy, overbearing way that she repeats, lifting her leg to catch his hips and pull him in tighter.

She lets her head roll back and smack against the wall as he pulls back, looking at her with a twisted reverence.

“You’re right,” he says, breath warm on her face. “That wasn't pure at all.” His mouth skates down her jaw and presses a gentle kiss to the hinge, another to her throat.

His touch shifts between hungry and coveting, as though she can hear through every little flicker of his lips the unspoken _I still love you._

She pushes him away when the pressure in her lungs give out and she cries in the bathroom for an hour, her voice catching on half-breathed _I wants_.

 

*

 

Paul gets him a week before winter term ends, the three of them fucked up and falling apart in her bedroom.

Lauren has long come to accept they don't really have anyone but each other after the last semester, but it's always a stark moment when she finds herself abandoned beyond the swell of the party with two boys who make her feel utterly uncoalesced. She's fucked out of her skull and has been for long enough that it seems inconsequential. Paul watches her with this calculated scrutiny that she's come to know well, and it hardly matters that Sean is sullen-faced beside her, one hand curled roughly around her shoulder - Paul sinks down all the same, his chest cradled in her lap, his hands pulling her into a kiss.

She lets him, his mouth warm against her numb lips - and numb has become a character trait in recent weeks but she can still feel how Sean tenses, his hand a possessive weight on her shoulder. Paul laughs as he kisses her, and he may be glancing above her to where Sean glowers but he’s dragging his tongue filthily across hers.

She exhales when he pulls back like the breath is being pulled free of her lungs. Sean is stiff behind her, from the tight grip on her arm to the betraying line of his cock resting against her side. He immediately tips her head back to meet his mouth, trying hard to replace Paul's taste on her tongue.

She can feel Paul's chest rumble with laughter against her back, pressed in by these boys in games she is disgusted to humour, all of it rather Dangerous Liaisons in sexual one-upmanship. Still, she lets Sean pull her up against him, bodies flush and wanting, even as Paul follows the movement. Perhaps because of that.

She feels sleepy-eyed as they pull apart but Sean's eyes are blazing hot, skidding up her skin. She knows Paul is the first thing he sees.

“Does she taste like me?”

“Shut up,” he says, curling his hands in Lauren's hair and stroking down to the nape of her neck, each movement steeped is possessiveness.

She twists around to strain against the touch but makes him curl his fingers tighter.

Paul smiles. She can feel it in the air, the shiver of nastiness that runs through him, a remnant of dissatisfaction and a boy called Dick, when he says, “why don't you make me.”

It's stupid. Obvious. A childish retort not fit for the illicit way they're all curled together or the slow buzz of liquor inside her, but Sean is still hard against her and his fingers are tight in her hair when he snarls. “Can't you go bother one of your queer friends for a pity blow instead of mooning after me?”

They all shift as one, boys squaring over her shoulder and it's a psychological disaster how wet she's getting from it, Sean's thigh pressed tight between her legs.

“Wow talk about being on the _offensive,_ ” Paul's eyes flash. She is sinking in that moment like in previous ones where he would flash his hypnotist's eyes at her and slide a long-fingered hand up her thigh and she would melt a touch at the mere thought of him. She sinks back against his body, slow like dripped honey in her every movement.

She sees the moment Sean twitches for something violent then crashes forward, kissing Paul roughly but as dirty as they have each been with her, trading the same frustration between them.

It's furious, the way she can see tiny flickers of tongue in the gap between their mouths, the short, harsh breaths through their noses as they press closer to her on either side like they are starved of one another.

They make a slick sound in pulling away, and Paul laughs even harder than before, like the E they split between them has finally set its teeth inside of him, Sean catching on like an infection. “Straight boys don't kiss like that, Seany.”

The giggles lift up from Lauren's lungs and burst inside her, swallowing them all before Sean can speak.

They fall together, a boy on either side, hard from each other but fit against her and she laughs at them for long tumbling moments until she slides bodily into sleep.

 

*

 

Lauren parts with them for break with a stripped-off sentimentality. She’s bundled up into a loose-knit sweater even though it’s getting warmer by the day, and there are enough acquaintances dotted around campus for her to wave off that she can avoid the boys with a facade of distraction.

She wonders if the phantom fingers across her skin are merely that or if they might be the need to shed off the whole year, because she thinks she might hate the callousness she has succumbed to. Camden may just be contagious, but it seems more like depression is catching. Paul doesn’t come for her anyway - she receives something akin to goodbye three days after she arrives home when he’s stoned and another voice is slurring across the line behind him, music tinny through it all; that’s fitting and reminiscent of their history, leaving one another like an afterthought and their last meeting a sloppy mouthed night of sexual frustration.

Sean never quite catches her, try as he might, though she feels the ripples of his frustration through the corridors. She wonders what might be wrong with her that she remains unbothered by want for him. By the time her cab comes she’s two songs into a blur cassette and she can hear his footfalls harsh on the paving slabs even over her walkman. She gets in the cab and doesn’t look up as it drives off. There’s snow thawing on the rolling lawns.


End file.
